Abstract

This dissertation examines the role of true belief in naturalized epistemology. Chapter 1 outlines and accepts three arguments for naturalizing epistemology: Quine's argument for naturalizing epistemology in response to the failure of logical empiricism, arguments deriving from psychologistic analyses of knowledge, and arguments for regarding methodological rules as hypothetical imperatives amenable to empirical test. It is argued that epistemology's normative aims can be achieved within the naturalized epistemology which emerges from these arguments. In Chapter 2, axiological pluralism is defended against axiological monism, and normative epistemology is rescued from relativism by a demonstration that true belief is a prevalent instrumental end of inquiry. Chapter 3 examines our epistemic access to true belief, regarded as a correspondence between mental states and the world. The abductive style of argument for scientific realism is rejected as question-begging, and an inductive schema is presented in its place. Considerations are adduced for refining this schema to speak of a theory's component claims rather than of the theory as a whole, and two of its instances are sketched, suggesting more detailed arguments for the claim that from the success of our scientific claims we are warranted in inferring their truth. Chapter 4 defends the correspondence account of truth presumed in previous chapters against a minimalist account and against three versions of a pragmatic account. Truth on the minimalist account, it is argued, cannot discharge its requisite explanatory duties, while pragmatic accounts of truth either fail to account for central pre-theoretic truth ascriptions or provide a notion of truth according to which truth itself cannot be ascertained. Such problems, it is observed, do not arise for a correspondence account. In Chapter 5 cognitive systems are shown to be rightly evaluated not just by their capacity to produce truths, but also according to their "sensitivity," that is, their capacity to detect features of their environment which bear directly on goals they could have. Epistemic relativism arises only if sensitivity and truth-conduciveness compete as epistemic virtues; reasons are provided to think that they do not compete, but rather that truth-conduciveness will typically accompany the attainment of sensitivity